AISD Accepts Monitor in New Deal With Texas Education Agency

Austin ISD Trustee Kathryn Whitley Chu, explaining the risks involved with not accepting a TEA monitor (Screenshot via Austin ISD)

It's a done deal – the Austin ISD Board of Trustees voted 8-1 on Tuesday night to accept an agreement with the Texas Education Agency that will keep a conservator from taking over the district's special education services.

Instead of a conservator, who could override district decisions, AISD will accept a monitor from TEA, who will sit in on board meetings and report back on the district's efforts to fix its broken special education department. As Board President Arati Singh said, "It's a tough pill to swallow, but for me a tougher pill to swallow would be inviting a conservator in."

Tuesday's deal is the latest development since TEA announced its intention in March to take over the district's special education services, after receiving dozens of complaints that AISD was breaking state law by taking months to evaluate students requesting the services. District leaders asked the board to reconsider the appointment of a conservator in May. TEA responded with a version of the current deal on Aug. 30. That proposal was condemned by most parents and teachers as an infringement on our community's local control of its schools and as a first step by the state agency in taking complete control of the district. They asked the board to reject the deal.

But, as AISD officials explained last week, the district did not have a great plan B. If the board rejected the deal, TEA was expected to immediately appoint a conservator anyway. Trustee Kathryn Whitley Chu explained that she was voting to support the deal in part because of what the appointment of a conservator would mean for the district.

"As we've seen in my own hometown of Houston and my extended family's hometown of Marlin, a conservator appointed for a narrow reason to a school district has broad authority to direct district staff, to overturn decisions of the board of trustees, and it starts the clock on a path toward a complete board takeover in two years," Whitley Chu said. "I've spent this month conferring with our legal counsel and education experts and our community, and these experts have advised that rejecting a conservator gives Austin ISD the best possible chance to continue with our progress."

The progress Whitley Chu mentioned is the district's continuing success in fixing the problem that got it into this situation in the first place – its inability from 2020 to 2022 to keep up with the number of children requesting an evaluation for special education services, the first step in receiving such services. In January, the district had a backlog of 1,780 uncompleted evaluations. After Superintendent Matias Segura made the backlog a priority and hired more evaluators, the number of pending evaluations dropped to 488 last month.

The agreement with TEA will require the district to completely erase the remaining backlog by Jan. 31 of next year and provide special education training to its staff. The district is also agreeing to conduct a third-­party audit of its data monitoring systems and to change the organization of its public meetings to focus 50% of its discussions on "student outcomes" – TEA-speak for test results.

These are mostly the same provisions the board was set to vote on last Thursday, before it became apparent that Segura was still negotiating for better terms with TEA. The superintendent did get some concessions in the last-minute requests – TEA agreed to give the district a 10-day grace period for meeting deadlines on training and improving its data systems. It also agreed that the district will only need to spend 50% of its time talking about student outcomes in public meetings, not closed ones.

Kevin Foster was the only trustee to vote against the deal. "The agreement, for me, crosses a sort of threshold into a matter of the erosion of local control," he said, explaining his belief that what is happening in Austin is part of a national movement to strip progressive communities of control over their neighborhood schools. "I think they want to, in different ways, do everything they can to curtail our powers. I don't believe that things are going to get better for Black kids that way. I don't think things are going to get better for children with disabilities, for newcomers, for immigrant students, for the range of kids that we serve – they're not going to get better because the state or federal levels tell us how to do our work."